While a local corporate "jazz" festival mostly elicits yawns and eyerolls, there's a lot of cool creative music at hand this week. Two fab local presenters are bringing some guests to town on Tuesday and Wednesday — both in the cozy, good-listenin' environs of Burdock. Endangered Blood (headlining a Music Gallery off-site Departures night) brings together four noteworthy players who are linked to a huge range of projects from Mr. Bungle to Tim Berne's Snakeoil Quartet. Tatsuya Nakatani (headlining Somewhere There's night on Wednesday) dazzled with his presence and his sense of the space between sounds in an appearance at Yonge-Dundas Square for Intersection last September, so his percussive works should be all the more intense in close quarters. Both shows also include top-notch local openers, from the ad hoc improvising crew that'll be joining Nakatani to a new iteration of The Mike Smith Company.

Two essential reads from this past week. This is what leadership looks like.

This feature catches us up on some recent efforts to fight sexual harassment and assault at music venues, starting with a show at Double Double Land on July 10th (the same night that Swans play T.O.) and including an alliance of local DIY spaces publicly supporting a zero tolerance policy against harassment. Hopefully local venues and promoters will get behind this initiative and add their voices.

Meanwhile, Mandi Hardy (probably best known to readers here as a member of Moonwood) has penned this excellent primer on privilege with a teacher's eye on how to move conversations from blame and defensiveness to understanding and constructive action.

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Founded as a blog about one curmudgeon's love affair with the em dash, Mechanical Forest Sound has grown to become a community-based archive of local musical culture. Assuming that "independent music" isn't just boys with guitars and "culture" isn't just some sort of pageant, MFS is an investigation of a wide range of artists, reflecting on concerts as shared experiences, acts of citizenship and a chance to get down — fuzzy photographs and clear-sounding original live recordings a specialty.

Current manifestations of this project include Track Could Bend, a monthly concert series featuring "improvised music and weird rock offshoots", presented in a casual environment.

At one point I wrote full-on concert reviews, and for longer I thought I would catch up and write about shows in the past. But these days, because of, y'know, life, do not expect much in the way of full show reviews — but live recordings with blurbs will be posted as quickly after the fact as is feasible.

All MP3's on this blog are audience recordings shared as a reminder of the excitement of seeing live music. If you are an artist who doesn't want their music shared in this way, please contact me and I shall remove it forthwith.